Flat Tax Is Almost Certainly The More Progressive Tax

I have sympathy with arguments for flat tax rates and for progressive tax rates, but I think the best arguments against progressive tax rates are the declining marginal utility of government spending, and the associated poor allocation of resources. Progressive taxation feeds on the desire to tax individuals more responsibility, where those that have more, put more back into society. Just as we’d ask a man in a desert with ten thousand water bottles to give more water to thirsty people than a man with five. 

The idea being, if a proportionate sum of money has far less marginal value to super rich George, and more to others where it can do more societal good, then there is a reasonable call for George to wish to be able to contribute to wider societal needs. It’s not difficult to demonstrate a utility function with declining marginal utility for which the utility of the higher parts of someone’s income provides less utility, and taxation provides higher overall utility. But only up to a point. When you have a case, as you do in the UK, where declining marginal utility of government spending comes into play, and additional taxation leads to misallocation, waste, bureaucratic overhead, and spending on things that most citizens do not want, any theoretical gains from redistribution are eroded by poor execution in practice. 

So while the logarithmic utility function captures this idea of diminishing marginal utility - that the more you earn, the less each extra pound matters in terms of increasing utility – a tax system that tries to ensure that, after taxes, the marginal utility is more equal for everyone, is likely to be better under a flat tax system if the private allocation of resources has much more utility for the poorest than the public allocation.

Ten Ways God’s Creation Might Have Been Different

Atheist Richard Carrier wrote a provocative piece entitled Ten Ways The World Would Be Different If God Existed (which I’d encourage you to read). I should think most Christians would spot the primary issue running through the whole piece: that it really amounts to Richard Carrier subjecting God’s existence to a probability estimate, and concluding:

P) The world isn’t what I’d expect it to be like if God exists.
C) Therefore, God probably doesn’t exist.

Now, to be fair to Richard on two counts; 1) Subjecting God’s existence to a probability estimate is a quite natural and necessary thing to do – so there’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, if it is undertaken with humility, and as long as it is understood that the probability of God can't be answered quantitively like we do with probability theory, where the probability of x is the ratio of cases favourable to x to all possible cases (although both of which are sorely lacking in Richard Carrier’s work). And 2), Even we Christians can all look at the world and ask ourselves why the world is this way instead of that way, and why it isn’t significantly better than it is, given God’s omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence.

But even brief exposure to Richard’s work shows that he does not have much humility when considering the Christian faith, he has a weak understanding of probability theory, and he habitually begins with a desire to create arguments that back up his already existent position that God does not exist and that Christianity is not the true path to knowing God. It doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind that his “The world isn’t what I’d expect it to be like if God exists” is a bad argument for God’s probable non-existence, is riddled with hubris, and is blind to the realisation that the main reason that is probably the case is that God has ways and power and intellect that are far above and beyond Richard Carrier’s grasp.

For all of Carrier’s audacious mental contortions, with which he looks to explain why his interpretation of created reality is superior to God’s, he seems to have missed the most obvious truth about the Christian God; that our Lord is so much higher and better than Richard Carrier that a universe created by such a God is one in which we should expect a vast epistemological gulf between Creator and created, even if we are created in His image, and endowed with astounding cognitive fecundity relative to the rest of creation. What should be the most obvious starting point, and the one that drives the appropriate epistemic humility necessary for such a consideration, is the one to which Richard Carrier has given the least amount of consideration – and by least, I mean next to zero. It’s a bit like beginning an exploration into marriage and giving no consideration at all to the nature of love.

My book on God’s genius presents a very different perspective on creation to the one Richard Carrier offers, so I won’t say any more about his Ten Ways in this post. But as a Christian who knows God exists, there are still plenty of ‘What if?’ elements to creation that are puzzling to Christians, so I thought I’d consider some of the more prominent ones in a piece I’ve entitled 10 Ways God’s Creation Might Have Been Different.

 1~ God might have created a world with far less natural suffering in it, and over a far shorter duration.
It does surprise me quite how much suffering there is in the world, especially in the animal kingdom, and for how long it has endured. The earth has been subjected to hundreds of millions of years of ‘red in tooth and claw’ evolution, replete with animal pain, injury, starvation and death - most of which has been going on for millions of years before humans even existed, and even longer before God made Himself directly known to creation through the scriptures in an ancient part of the Middle East. It does seem an excessive amount of precursory suffering in the build up to the creation story revealed in scripture.

2~ God might have made His presence and accessibility much more obvious than He has.
Let me say, I believe that there is more than enough evidence available for any who want to know God and have a relationship with Him, through Christ and the Holy Spirit. But there’s no question that for many people, they feel it is harder to be convinced of God’s existence than they might expect it to be – and that for a loving God who wants a relationship with us, He could have created a world in which He does more to facilitate thart. A development of this idea was made famous by philosopher John Schellenberg, with his ‘divine hiddenness’ problem – in which he asks why God's existence is not more evident or obvious, particularly to those who seek God sincerely but fail to find convincing evidence of His presence.

3~ God might have made Christians somewhat more outstanding than they are.
I get that we are all imperfect, flawed, fallen, and that we Christians are all a work in progress. I also get that a typical church has all kinds of people with different backgrounds and experiences, who are on different stages of their journey. But it could be seen as peculiar that people who have a direct relationship with God, the Creator of the universe, are not more tangibly different than those who do not. I’m not saying there is no difference at all – but when a typical atheist or agnostic sees some of the absurd things that Christians believe, the strange behaviour, the half-hearted commitment to full truthseeking, the in-house squabbling, and the consistent inability to grow and progress with the passion and grace that one could expect, it’s conceivable that God might have created alternative conditions under which becoming a Christian has an even more radically, almost superhuman, enhancing effect on believers’ lives that most other people are hungry to have what they have.

4~ God could have created a reality in which all creatures, including us, began in some kind of blissful state, and things just kept getting even more blissful.
Now, ok, I can conceive of most of the benefits of living in an imperfect world, and the exhilaration of a ‘work in progress’ creation story like the one we live in. But God might have created a world without sin, fallenness, and where life is just blissful, yet with enough potential further bliss to keep being more and enhanced through His supreme power. I don’t really know to what extent such a world would even be possible, but I’m sure we can imagine the idea of a world that could be a lot better than this one, but still compelling enough to contain healthy degrees of freedom, growth and development.

 5~ God might have allowed a creation story without the need for hell, or where everyone is saved in the end.
Perhaps an alternative creation story without hell was a possibility. And some Christians do believe in hell but believe that all will eventually come to see the error of their ways, and eventually get to spend eternity in God’s presence. I trust God knows what He’s doing in that regard, and that His outcomes will be just and merciful – but perhaps it’s possible to at least consider a creation story without hell (either on earth, or as a final state of being) – especially as God created all the initial conditions in which the cosmic story brought about people who had the capacity to end up in hell.

6~ God could have created a world in which physical pain sensations weren’t quite so severe.
I get why we need pain fibres and sensitivity to physical pain to guard against further damage to our bodies. But it seems that God could have created pain sensations that weren’t quite so excruciating. You know the feeling you get when you’re holding fairly hot cup, and you know that within the next 5 seconds you’re going to have to put it down otherwise it will really burn – perhaps He could have created an upper limit on physical pain whereby it hurts enough but not as much as it does when it’s excruciating.

7~ God could have made scripture even more unmistakably and unambiguously His word.
God could have imparted information about physical reality that only God could know to the writers of the Old and New Testaments. If the Bible had information in it that would be impossible for ancient civilisations to have known without Divine revelation, then people would be more reluctant to claim that God has provided no proof for His existence.

Summary and conclusion
Let’s be clear; on balance, there is more than enough evidence for anyone seeking to know God to find Him. And while the seven points above are little more than flawed thought experiments from a mind unable to fathom more than a hint of God’s splendour and majesty, I must say, having written a book about God’s genius in creation, and having spent years in a relationship with Him, I have faith, trust and confidence in His choice of creation story, His Divine plan, and His perfect knowledge of what He is doing. I believe that an honest and sincere enquiry will reveal that God has made His presence as accessible as we need. As I advised a friend recently; keep seeking the truth about every proposition in the world, prioritise love, and follow where it leads, and you will find God.

Weighted Self-Perception

 

Self-perception is an interesting thing. My perception of my 'self' is based upon mental formulations in the present moment - but they are formulations related to my past experiences, knowledge and memories alongside my current imagination. So any self-perception in the here and now is rather like a weighted average of all those past events, circumstances and feelings already lived. They are balanced out in the mind of the 'me' that makes those present day perceptions.

Regarding how stably they average out - that perhaps depends a lot on the historical bottlenecks of the extremes in life. Someone whose ups and downs have been steady in life can probably find a more stable present-tense average than people whose extremes have been loaded onto their younger years or years closer to the present. Someone in their forties whose past damage occurred in their teens may have had three decades in which to equilibrate to an average. That may be why many people who've suffered lots in childhood go on to be calming, balanced, inspirational figures in maturity. Someone in their forties whose damage has occurred in more recent times may well still be raw from it, thus aggravating the average in more immediate terms. Those are just a few possible examples of many.

That probably also explains why people who suffer extreme damage on a regular basis with little respite often end up cracking up - they are not able to obtain the weighted average necessary for a balance of experiential qualities. It also perhaps explains why those who've incurred no real damage in life, and a live a very circumspect and moderate existence, have often experienced fewer highs.

Of course, there will be exceptions and outliers, as well as patterns - and these above examples are more like jigsaw pieces than complete pictures. But I think they point to truths that are actually manifest in people's lives.

The Most Attractive Quality For Prospective Partners

 

I was interested to see this article, which reports on the finding that, according to psychologists, playfulness is just about the most attractive personality trait for prospective partners. This is based on the five character traits that are claimed to be most attractive to a beloved:

1. Kindness and understanding

2. Intelligence

3. Sense of humour

4. Being fun loving

5. Having an exciting personality

These are fairly broad brush descriptive terms, but where the quality of playfulness is thought to give its head is in the notion that playful people are great to be in a relationship with because they are funny, laid back and creative, and that playful qualities like teasing, wordplay, improvising and light-heartedness are exhibitions of emotional intelligence, and very attractive qualities in a beloved. 

So now you know! 

Yours Truly, 

Your playful host. 😀

Inflated Expectations, Sunk Trade & The Tariff Tango

Let me start with one of the plainest economics truisms in the whole subject of trade; if a country makes things more expensive to produce domestically, it becomes less competitive, increases trade deficits with other countries, and confers an advantage on countries that produce those equivalent things less expensively.

Consequently, it shouldn’t be hard to get the Brexiters/Remainers debaters to concur that, as UK costs are in pounds and, say, French costs are in Euros, what determines the exchange rate between them is, among other things, the cost of producing things. We can put aside here that while inflation reduces the value of the pound, it doesn’t always translate to reduced demand for UK goods if the exchange rate adjusts appropriately (remember that in the cases when inflation leads to a depreciation of the pound, whereby it can initially boost foreign demand for UK goods due to their relative cheapness, the very same inflation will also raise production costs domestically, which will have a cancelling effect of the competitiveness gains from currency depreciation). But the upshot here is, it is always the case that economic policy errors that increase the cost of producing things for your own domestic citizens are counter-productive and inimical to healthy trade.

For ease, let’s forget about all the other trades that UK and France make with other nations, and make the point with a simple trade flow between these two nations (and for further ease, we can put aside the fact that because multiple countries use the Euro as their currency, this complicates the relationship between production costs and exchange rates, and just focus on a simple case, which could be applied to any 2 currencies).

In this model, the only reason Brits want to buy Euros with pounds is to buy French goods, and the only reason France want to sell Euros for pounds is to buy British goods. If Brits try to buy more Euros than the French want to sell, the price of Euros in pounds goes up. If the French want to sell more Euros than Brits want to buy, the price goes down, as it does in other markets. The price of Euros in pounds, the exchange rate, ends up at the price at which supply equals demand, which means that Brits are importing the same pound (and Euro) value of goods that they are exporting.

Suppose the UK government mistakenly decides to impose a tariff on French imports. French goods are now more expensive to Brits, which is obviously bad for Brits. Since they want to buy less from France, they don’t need as many Euros, so the demand for the Euro goes down, and the price of Euros in pounds goes down, which reduces the cost of French goods to Brits (remember this is just a consideration of UK and France – for this exercise, forget that other European nations use the Euro)*.

Suppose the UK becomes less good at making things due to bad political policies (a scenario that, sadly, doesn’t need much imagining). Pound prices of UK goods in the UK go up, which makes UK goods more expensive to French purchasers, so they buy fewer of them, decreasing the demand for pounds on the pound/Euro market. This shifts the exchange rate, where pounds are now less valuable, so their price falls. This doesn’t mean we are less competitive in the short term, but it does erode domestic purchasing power, which is particularly problematic in an import-dependent economy like the UK.

One of the main follies of getting trade wrong, especially uttered by bombastic politicians who want to give the impression of ‘putting our country first’ is that language is distorted, so terms like competition are often confused with combative ‘zero sum’ language, inaccurately framing trade as a “them vs. us” scenario. When that happens, political attempts to apply tariffs or regulations to confer domestic advantage are confused due to bad analogical thinking, which usually ends up reducing domestic productivity and thinly spreading costs of bad policies onto domestic citizens.

And finally, of course, the sure fire way to devalue the pound even more is to inflate the currency, which has happened off the scale in recent years in the UK. What that does is lower the value of the pound in international trade, but it does not make our goods more attractive to foreigners — they get more pounds for their currency, but need more of their currency to buy our goods, since prices have gone up – which is a bad thing for just about everyone.

*It’s true that exchange rates are influenced by more than just trade flows and production costs (especially capital flows and interest rate differentials) and inflation’s effects on exchange rates and competitiveness are complex, but that doesn’t undermine the argument above, and is beyond the scope of this article.

Why Couldn't God Have Just Forgiven Our Sins Without The Cross?

 

Also published on my Network Norfolk page this week

Regarding Christ's sacrifice on the cross as an act of grace in atonement for our sins, the question is frequently asked: Why couldn't God have just forgiven our sins anyway, without the need for the torture and death of the crucifixion? God must have known about alternative options when considering all possible creation stories, but instead chose the cross, which suggests He knows things we don't about why the cross is a better method of atonement than simply forgiving us all.

I have a speculative answer as to why that might be. I think the above explores two similar scenarios, but with a key distinction: the first (the cross) is God acting to pay off the debt on our behalf, and the second (just forgive us anyway) is God writing off the debt without action. If it's better to pay off a debt than simply write it off, we may be able to discern this by looking at actions between humans. If we think of all the people each of us has wronged in our lives, some cases will involve acts of forgiveness and reconciliation, but some won't. In other words, in the human story, there is a lot of unforgiveness that resembles unpaid debt, and the only way it can be put right between human agents is through volitional forgiveness and reconciliation. It can't be put right by writing off the debt without action—or even if it can, it is definitely an inferior resolution to the aforementioned alternative.

Now, consider it another way. Suppose Frank owes Jack £1000 after a loan, and Frank is forever struggling to pay it back. Tom could offer to pay Jack on behalf of Frank, so the debt is settled, but he couldn't reasonably suggest that the three of them just forget about the £1000 and that that settles things in the same way.

I think these illustrations might show why God can't just forgive sins without paying the debt Himself. God could perhaps use writing off the debt without action as a means to forgive our sins against Him, but perhaps He cannot use writing off the debt without action as a sacrificial Divine gesture to cover the human sins committed against each other. However, by having suffered and died for us on the cross, God acted to pay off all the debt on our behalf. This became the instrument through which we are enjoined to forgive each other, because we are enjoined to share in Christ's suffering in order to live a life that emulates Divine love, grace, and forgiveness.

Exploring Mental Health

Today is World Mental Health Day, which aims to “raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and to mobilise efforts in support of mental health”. Fair enough, I’m game, because mental health is important.

I nearly always welcome comments on my posts, but for this one, I actively encourage participation because diverse perspectives might be particularly valuable here, and I’d value your views on the subject.

Here I’m considering the UK’s perception of mental health and how we are performing in diagnosing negative mental health. Getting the right kind of mental health diagnosis at a population level is a complex problem to solve. Are we over-diagnosing or under-diagnosing mental health problems in the UK? And how would we measure that?

Let’s start with something we can probably say with confidence. Given that, throughout most of our modern history, very little regard was given to the subject of mental health, and given that most of the mental health problems people now encounter were undiagnosed and not even conceived of in our history, it’s a fairly safe assumption that we have under-diagnosed mental health problems in the past. But what about now?

Part of the consideration of under or over-diagnosis has to be about the definitions used. For example, the World Health Organisation (WHO) defines mental health as “A state of well-being in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.” Under that definition, I’d expect most people to claim sub-optimal mental health, especially during many difficult periods of their life, because those criteria are big asks. 

Moreover, because of the numerous ways the UK has made a big mess of its own society, there are lots of impediments (some of them self-created) to an individual realising their abilities, coping with the normal stresses of life, working productively, and contributing positively to their community, that may not be proximally attributable to poor mental health. Perhaps we are under-diagnosing negative mental health in some cases and over-diagnosing it in others. Perhaps we are not focusing enough on the causes of positive mental health or doing enough to encourage these things. I don’t know.

And the places in which we are over-diagnosing negative mental health are bound to be extremely costly for UK society as a whole. There are likely to be many areas in life in which the cause of sub-optimal well-being is more directly attributable to things like not seeking the truth, failing to take proper responsibility for thoughts and actions, having too few close connections, an absence of positive people in life, life choices that negatively affect sleep, exercise, and diet, inadequate emotional awareness, and things of that nature. These are likely to increase anxiety, and may even lead to a diagnosis of depression, which in some cases might not be justifiably clinical.  

A successful diagnosis can give an individual access to medication, support and other resources they might not otherwise have had. A faulty diagnosis may deepen the problems further, create a stigma, and distract attention from more viable correctives. And there are obvious costs with false negatives (not diagnosing a mental health issue when it’s there) and obvious costs with false positives (diagnosing a mental health issue when there is a better explanation).

At some point in the future, I hope to address the complex landscape of mental health with a video series on my YouTube channel. But for now, I’d love to hear your perspectives in the comments section.

Sticky Belief Traps

In seeing what you are willing to believe, bad agents acquire the opportunity to know how easy it would be to get you to comply with their aims. For example, if they can get you to believe that a man is really a woman, or that there is an impending climate catastrophe, or that women are paid unfairly compared to men, then it sends out information signals that you are able to comply without being much of a friend of rigorous scrutiny. These information signals reveal to bad agents those who might be more easily influenced to be part of their in-group, and those who are likely to question them more rigorously, and reject their claims after a deeper analysis.

But there are also different types of uncritical belief that depend on external factors, which means in some cases if an individual is likely to fall for x, they are highly likely to fall for y, yet unlikely to fall for z – where x, y and z are things that people believe relatively unquestioningly. For example, if you are willing to accept that a male can become a female on the basis of subjective preference, you are probably also more likely to believe that there is a climate crisis, and that women are paid unfairly compared to men. If you believe that capitalism is a net force for ill, and that the rich are getting most of the spoils at the expense of the poor, then you are much more likely to stand in a pro-Palestine march than a pro-Israel march.

On the other hand, if you’re a young earth creationist, you’re more likely to side with Israel, but less likely to believe that a man can become a woman. Because young earth creationism is a conservative error, young earth creationists are also less likely, on average, to subscribe to climate alarmism, but more likely to believe that homosexual practice is sinful. This is because the information signals that exhibit what you are likely to comply with are also influenced by external factors, like whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, religious or not religious, educated or uneducated, a working taxpayer or not a working taxpayer, young or old, that sort of thing.

Of course, while this observation is about adults, and how their susceptibility to certain beliefs provides information signals that can be exploited by manipulative agents to determine how easily they might conform to certain ideological agendas – the other part of the disturbing picture is that many of the schools, universities and the majority of the media are already trying to get children under their thrall from as young an age as possible, with their parents often fully complicit in the cultural conditioning, as they’ve been through similar indoctrination processes or lack of critical engagement themselves. 

 

People Are Finally Starting To Wake Up To The 'Net Zero' Madness

Imagine if a teenager with no knowledge of cars walked into a garage and started to tell the mechanics how they should be tuning the engines they are working on. Or imagine if a passenger on a flight attempted to break into the pilot’s cockpit and take over the flying of the plane, without knowing the first thing about flying a plane. Or imagine if a guy off the street offered to rewire your house, without the faintest clue about electrical wiring. You get the gist. In each of these cases, it’s obvious that they don’t have the competence or authority to make these demands.

But there are millions of people today – ranging from young daft nuisance vandals, through to mature politicians and media commentators – who think they have the competence and authority to demand an end to fossil fuels, or at the least 'net zero', by an arbitrary date. Alas, not everyone grasps how absurd this is. Compared to the intractability of the world’s carbon industries in a highly complex global industry, with tens of billions of interconnected needs, fixing a car, flying a plane or rewiring a house is a highly manageable task.

Yet on these matters we still wouldn’t counsel opinion from amateurs, unskilled in the industries in question. So with that in mind, why on earth do people entertain the deranged fantasy that individuals have the first clue about the world’s optimum oil consumption at any given time, about what the right balance of energy sources is, about the dynamically shifting global economies and the intricate web of energy demands that sustains them, and about prospective dates when we should just pretend we can bring a halt to all this?

Net zero has been one of the most widespread Dunning-Kruger ‘Mount stupid’ delusions ever wrought on modern societies, and thankfully, although it's still early days, we are starting (stress, starting) to see increased pushbacks, as more and more people are slowly waking up to how irresponsible it is, and how impoverishing it is for poorer people (and the poorer the society, the more disastrous net zero policies are for them).

Fossil fuels powered the greatest material progression-explosion the world has ever seen, lifting billions of people out of poverty and hardship - and they are still the cheapest and most efficient fuel on the planet. It's disgraceful that British MPs voted to represent our national interests are hell-bent on impeding our industrial standing in the world, prioritising misguided policies that undermine energy security, production and economic growth. They are prepared to jeopardise the UK in the name of perverse ideological agendas, for the purposes of reckless, narcissistic virtue-signalling. 

Some people have always been awake to this nonsense, while many others have been sceptical but passive. Thankfully, the signs are that enough people across Europe are now beginning to get so fed up of having their livelihoods compromised by eco-fanaticism that their influence is beginning to gather some momentum. Let's hope it continues, because the right and most pressing political question of this time is not Has the damage we’ve done to the climate taken us too far into an irreparable plight? – it is Has the damage already done by the preposterous net zero lunacy taken us too far into an irreparable plight? You can tell the kind of person you’re dealing with by which of those questions occupies most of their concern.

Truth, Beliefs & Confidence

 

Think about your individual beliefs and views on any given subject. Take a belief and call it x. You believe x is true, but what is your level of confidence in that belief? You might say you know it's true, or you don't know if it's true, or you are unsure of the strength of your conviction. The strongest statement is that you believe x and you know x is true. Think about how many of your beliefs fall into this category.

Now think about the beliefs you hold where you do not know if they are true. Then ask two further questions; 1) Why don't I know if the belief is true? And 2) Why do I still believe it if I don't know it's true? Note; I'm not saying it's always wrong to believe things you do not know are true - I'm just inviting you to think about the meta-questions surrounding your beliefs.

It's quite possible to have a justified belief in x without being sure x is true. It's also possible for x to be true without your knowing why you should know it's true. But for all the beliefs you have where you don't know they are true (for example, if you believe x, and x isn't true, it's impossible for you to know it's true - obviously!), some might be false, and you don't know why they are false. Not knowing a belief is false is primarily the reason why you mistakenly think it's true. But if you think it's true, but can't claim to know it's true, you should start to consider why you feel you don't know it's true.

Of all the beliefs in this category (where you accept P but reject -P without full comprehension of why), we can bring in a philosophical term called defeasibility. Beliefs are said to be defeasible when there is a realistic possibility that they could yet be shown to be false (we could discuss what we mean by 'realistic' but that's too much for this post). For something to defeat your belief x, a proposition would have to be presented that makes you no longer believe x. To be sure that your belief x is true, you'd have to be fully confident that there are no propositions that could be introduced that would change your mind about x.

But this level of confidence requires a kind of meta-level confidence in your ability to know that there are probably no prospective defeaters out there - and that is perhaps the defining wisdom in the confidence in believing x and being confident x is true. Furthermore, if you are in the position where you have no defeaters, you will probably be able to comfortably identify some (if not all) of the defeaters in your opponent's position.

One of the fundamental human problems is this; If someone you think you're allied to says something, you're more likely to believe it; if someone you think you're opposed to says something, you're more likely to reject it. This causes blindness to your own faults and to your opponents' strengths, and it amplifies to the point where you find it prohibitively difficult to see any other perspective or listen to balanced reasoning on particular matters.

Humans are primed to pursue status and reputation, and the status and reputation they prefer most is gaining regard from the people about whose thoughts, opinions and acceptance they care about most (call it group x). But left undisciplined, this creates a feedback loop, in that they look to gain more regard from group x, and care more about what group x thinks, and the more they care, the more regard they need from them, and the more regard they need, the more they care what they think, and so on. 

The trouble with feedback loops like this is that individuals who succumb to them get swallowed up into a cause or ideology or belief system from which it becomes harder and harder to disentangle themselves - and, as a consequence, harder to remain individuated and authentic. The only antidote to this is to look for allies in an honest search for the truth, because that is the alliance most valuable to yourself and to others.

How Likely Are Long Distance Relationships To Work?

 

Everyone knows the potential barriers to the success of long distance relationships, where many result in dissolution. But with strong communication, trust, transparency, frequent meet ups, and clear, mutually established expectations, many of them do turn out to be successful in the long run.

One of the key incentives in long distance relationships might be the increased quality of time spent together in the teeth of lack of frequency. Think of it like this. One of the well known (to economists) effects of trade taxes like import/export tariffs is the Alchian–Allen effect, which says that when a fixed unit price is added to two similar goods of different prices, consumers will sometimes have an incentive to favour the higher priced good. In other words, if the fixed cost is high, the quality will increase too. 

Here's an example of why. Suppose you live in the UK and are looking to buy one of the newly designed music systems on the Japanese market. There are two kinds, and they are the only two of their kind in the world - let's call them Model A and Model B. Let's say that in UK currency, Model A is the £150 model, and Model B is the £300 model. Model B is twice the cost of Model A, except for one additional fact - we'll say all Japanese items shipped to the UK come with a supplementary £100 overseas postage cost.

That is to say, to buy Model A will actually cost you £250 and to buy Model B will actually cost you £400. But notice what's happened when we add on the Alchian–Allen effect; if there were no postage costs then Model B (£300) would be double the cost of Model A (£150) - but with the additional £100 postage cost, Model B (£400) is only 1.6 times the cost of Model A (£250) - meaning that when that fixed unit price (£100) is added to the two goods of different prices, we've more chance of favouring the higher priced good because it becomes more worth our while.

The nature of increased consumption of the higher variable cost good occurring when adding a fixed cost to two independent prospects could be creatively applied to long distance relationships too: they are a bit like an equivalent postage cost, because for some couples, the increased effort required in seeing one another might play out in improved quality of time spent together, deepening the mutual bond and connection. If you've travelled from Brighton to Leicester to see your beloved, you are unlikely to sit in and watch Netflix together all weekend – you are likely to want to make the most of every moment spent together.

What's It Like Being An Eco-Vandal?

 

I recall a quote by computer designer Charles Babbage that has stuck with me over the years, about having an opponent who strikes him as so confused that he is difficult to understand - "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question", Babbage said.

After eco vandals threw soup on great works of art last week, the weekend got me thinking about what it must be like to be one of those Just Stop Oil members who committed such an act. Like Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke an individual to believe they have no future because of climate change - much less, cause misery to innocent people as a result.

Consider the journey you'd have to make to go from ordinary citizen in society, to someone who behaves like that. Just imagine how divorced from reality you'd have to be, to be willing to damage private property and works of art while being filmed, cause misery to holidaymakers, put lives at risk through mass congestion, and rob yourself of your own freedom by being thrown into prison for such acts - all for the distinction of being puppets having your strings pulled by corrupt organisations and self-serving narcissistic cult leaders.

I guess you might point out that they don't know they've been ensnared by a cult, and that most people never do - but if they’re willing to risk prison for their beliefs, then it seems surprising that they haven't up to this point undertaken the relatively simple task of thinking things through with more care and consideration. I actually find it hard to even conceive of the journey downwards one would need to take from sane analysis to the depths of madness we are seeing with climate alarmism and hysteria-driven criminal activity.

What would a sane analysis of climate change reveal? I am almost certain it would reveal that there are problems we are going to have to solve - but that we don't have, and will not have, a climate crisis or a climate catastrophe to deal with. With climate change, we are not talking about a massive change in the short term (which might constitute a crisis), we are talking about gradual changes over a long period of time. Over the course of the next century, we are likely to see climate change necessitating small changes in behaviour, alongside which our technological advancements will be far more substantial. Human ingenuity will enable us to adjust to gradual climate change, where we make tweaks to correct for gradual temperature rises when we need to.

The insistence that we are facing a climate crisis is not one that someone committed to a sane analysis would easily arrive at once they'd factored in the full suite of considerations at play. Consequently, falling for the 'climate crisis' narrative as a bystander is an act of moderate failure. But falling for it to the extent that you are willing to cause harm to others, get yourself locked up in prison, and think that you are a force for good in doing so, is an act of such absurd madness, attention-seeking and selfishness that I really do find it hard to imagine what it's like to arrive at that place, or be such a person.

In Fairness to Trussonomics

 

Liz Truss has said this week: “Things would be better if I was still in charge” – a comment which has elicited ridicule and chagrin with almost equal measure.

I’m not convinced that most of the critics of what’s been pejoratively labelled ‘Trussonomics’ are qualified enough to know better, especially those who looked to reject the whole thing; but I’m equally unconvinced that Liz Truss ever had a proper handle on things either. And although it’s a personal thing, I don’t find her very likeable, which probably makes it harder to warm to her intentions, and give her some benefit of doubt.

But I'll try, because theoretically Trussonomics needn't have been quite as bad as many people made out – it’s a combination of one main fatal flaw in the idea and the practical elements which made it a disaster. The framework of Truss’s proposals are the very thing the UK so badly needs – especially tax cuts, supply-side reforms, deregulation, and stimulating economic growth by removing state-imposed impediments and incentivising investment. Because what Britain needs is long-term economic growth – and that will only happen with deregulation, decreased state spending, increased private sector investment and job creation.

Truss wanted to turn Britain into a much-needed thriving economy, with increased productivity, and as a place where outsiders were willing to invest. Critics who favour free markets said the big problem was the execution, not the idea. But that’s not quite right. The execution was indeed terrible – that’s plain for all to see; it culminated in panic, financial turmoil and lost confidence in the markets, necessitating a quick government u-turn. But the idea was fundamentally flawed too, because it was based on increasing borrowing with a flaky strategy for fiscal discipline. Combined with the high levels of public debt and the unique inflationary pressures around that time, the idea was defective and poorly timed, which made the execution inevitably disastrous.

The upshot is, I think Truss deserves most of her criticism – but it should be borne in mind that many of the fundamental principles of Trussonomics are still exactly what the country badly needs – especially lower taxes, a less burdensome state, supply-side reforms, mass deregulation, increased private sector investment and job creation. It’s just that I honestly can’t think of any politicians in any of the current political parties in whom I’d have enough confidence that they have the combined competence and courage to do what’s required to turn this economy around.

When Simplicity Becomes Over-simplicity

In one of my book’s chapters, I have a section in which I state that a great many of the issues with people’s faulty reasoning, arguments and views are due to the problem of over-simplistic thinking. In fact, if a proposition is defective, you can be fairly sure that over-simplicity is involved somewhere. And just as we know the well-worn truism that it takes more effort to correct a falsehood than state one, the concomitant truth is that the amount of effort needed to redress an overly-simplistic proposition is vastly greater than the effort required to produce it. To correct an over-simplified view, one must reintroduce the complexities, provide detailed explanations, and often counteract the appeal of the simpler narrative – and that’s to say nothing of the investigation of cognitive biases and defectiveness involved in producing the errors.

Consequently, then, a most reliable syllogism is this:

Topic X is complex

A’s position on X is over-simplistic

Therefore, A’s position on X is inadequate and likely to be strewn with error.

Here are a couple of easy examples:

Prices are complex

A’s position on price fixing is overly-simplistic

Therefore, A’s position on price fixing is inadequate and likely to be strewn with error.

And....

Climate change is complex

 A’s position on fixing climate change is overly-simplistic

Therefore, A’s position on climate change is inadequate and likely to be strewn with error.

Here I’m drawing the distinction between being simplistic and over-simplistic. Being simplistic is frequently fine; being over-simplistic is frequently not. The challenge, then, is to try to determine when something simplistic (and is presentable in a succinct argument) becomes over-simplistic and compromises the accuracy, nuance, or essential complexity of the subject. An argument can present the main points clearly, but omit some details for the sake of parsimony (simplistic), whereas an argument that omits essential information or key variables, and significantly undermines the understanding of the issue, is likely to be over-simplistic. An argument that relies on some generalisations for brevity, but where they are generally reasonable and broadly applicable is fine (simplistic), but if it includes unfounded assumptions or cunningly neglects to factor in the true diversity and complexity of the subject matter, then it is over-simplistic.

Consider these two examples:

Free trade is complex

Economists’ position on X is simplistic

Therefore, economists’ position on free trade is inadequate and likely to be strewn with error

And…

Biological evolution is complex

Biologists’ position on biological evolution is simplistic

Therefore, biologists’ position on biological evolution is inadequate and likely to be strewn with error

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong the two sets of premises here, as long as they are simple but not overly-simple. Relative to the collective complexity of free trade and biological evolution, even those who speak best on these subjects do so by shaving off a lot of complexity in order to make succinct but accurate statements about these subjects. So, it isn’t always the case that using simplistic language is a synonym for being in error. It’s certainly possible to write saliently about a complex subject in a simple way – that’s what most good writers do. Economists and biologists who write simply and accessibly are usually not writing this way because they do not understand the complexities: it’s usually to help the reader understand complex subjects in a rudimentary, manageable way. This isn’t true of groups like socialists and climate change alarmists – they frequently over-simplify complex matters because it helps them to justify their actions and gather support for their cause.

It’s fine to write simplistically to make key points or to present short writing pieces, but over-simplistic statements are problematic when the reduction of complexity leads to a loss of essential truth, failure to factor in the full gravitas of the subject, and other inadequacies that undermines your position. And here’s a particularly incisive truth to close with, I think. If you have a viewpoint, and it is overly-simplistic and inadequate, it’s not as though you won’t be aware of it – you will know deep down that you are being disingenuous, and that what you are saying does not do proper justice to the complexity of the considerations that need to be included. If you’re in that camp in any of your views, you’re going to be suppressing emotions that make you feel ashamed and disappointed – and deep down, you’re not going to be feeling good about yourself, and nor are the people supporting you.

Over-simplicity, coupled with a perverse agenda, is the cause of many false, toxic, and damaging belief systems in the world. But I think that’s because over-simplicity is one of the most effective tools for perverting the agenda, attracting followers, and dismissing outside scrutiny - especially if one can attempt to lay claim to moral superiority in doing so.

The Only Way To Heal Society

 

Political issues aside, everything wrong in the UK has multiple, complex causes. But I believe that the primary causes - directly or indirectly - of what’s fundamentally wrong in society are: 

1)    The decline of Christian beliefs and priority of Christian values

2)    A lack of care or desire for the truth

3)    The breakdown of marriage and the family unit

4)    The weakening of church community and engagement

I’d say literally everything that’s wrong with the UK society – the devaluation of human life, the erosion of a robust moral framework, increased anxiety and confusion, false religions and cults, loss of purpose and identity, idolatry, hedonism, excessive consumerism, narcissism, neglect of community and social responsibility, self-serving leadership, rising mental health issues, wokeism, cancel culture, confusion over identity, extreme factions, isolation, the list goes on – is directly or indirectly linked to some or all of the above four things.

A society that became transformed and re-rooted with those four pillars would be thriving, healthier, happier, more truthful, unified, purposeful and fulfilled.

The Economics Of Queuing, Booking & Paying

At the weekend, my wife and I went to a pub restaurant that operated on a first-come, first-served table system. When we arrived, there were no tables available, so we were added to a waiting list. After having a drink, we were seated within 15 minutes. The dining experience was wonderful, and the food was fabulous. I got talking to the manager about their non-booking system, and how they'd made a success of it, maximising turnover in the process. From an economist's perspective, there are pros and cons to both types of system (booking and non-booking) - but to make the latter work, you typically have to offer a top-notch customer experience and have an excellent reputation.

Just as this restaurant made queuing a pleasant experience for its patrons, I predict that with continually advancing technology we will have to queue a lot less than we do now. There'll be far less queuing in shops, in bars, on roads, etc because automated bots will be bringing us our goods, serving our drinks and driving our cars. But until that day comes, let's have a further chat about queues, booking and paying.

We all know what it is like to decide which checkout line to go to in a busy supermarket. The human motivation of all shoppers is to get out of the store as quickly as possible. To do this, one must first do a quick scan at the number of people and the number of goods in each shopping trolley in each checkout line, to get a sense of how long each person in the queue may take. During this time, we'll be on the lookout for potential delays, such as old ladies with vouchers or chequebooks, items that have hard to read barcodes, items like fruit and veg that may need a manual entry from the cashier, single people packing their own bags vs. couples with one of them doing the packing, that sort of thing.

This is the basis of complex systems theory: individual agents trying to maximise their own utility, whereby in just a few seconds the mind executes some rapid computations to ascertain which of a number of possibilities is the optimal one. Because of this, in busy supermarkets, most checkout lines most of the time will appear to involve roughly the same perceived waiting time (and usually the same actual waiting time too).

Queues frustrate many people, but we use queues as a way to deal with short-term fluctuations in demand. Queues are usually a problem of supply meeting demand without any additional costs. But the best way to understand queues is that they are a constraint on the supplier's ability to provide a good or service at the price or speed the consumer (and often the provider) desires. Additionally, it's usually to do with number of personnel, skills of personnel, amount of space, etc - but whenever you have to wait in line, there is a constraint occurring somewhere. 

With the qualities of the free market, you are all but guaranteed (through price theory) to facilitate the most rational, incentive-driven allocation of resources possible. In theory, if the price is set right according to supply and demand, there should be virtually no queuing. If prices are too low, demand exceeds supply, and queues are expected to form. As the price rises, we lose the consumers who are not willing to pay more, so the queue diminishes. We reach equilibrium when the price is high enough to ensure the quantity demanded equals the quantity supplied - which is the point at which we'd expect no queue. In other words, if prices are set correctly, demand will fall until the queue reaches zero.

I don't queue very often because I rarely care enough about any consumable good to wait 20 or 30 minutes in line for it. Because there are many people like me, queues engender lots of opportunity costs for providers and suppliers. Imagine a queue at a Building Society in which one customer arrives every two minutes, and one customer every two minutes is dealt with by a member of staff. All it takes is a hold up somewhere in the Building Society (a customer with a complex problem, one of the team on a lunch break, someone off sick, or an influx of people joining the queue), and you could have a queue of ten people. That means anyone joining the queue has to wait for at least twenty minutes to be served. While a Building Society may not lose much custom this way, a food stall surrounded by lots of competition probably would. Queues allocate resources efficiently, but not optimally, because they do not distinguish between Jack, who wants a good or service really badly, and Jill, who doesn’t care much about the good or service but joined the queue simply because she saw there was only one person waiting in line.

Waiting in line is an example of a sub-optimal event, which has been improved by technology that improves sale experiences for consumers. For example, being able to buy a cinema seat online in advance is a far more useful way of allocating the scarce resources of a popular movie than queuing outside in the hope that the cinema won't sell out of tickets. Improved technology that enables consumers to pay according to how much they value something is superior to waiting in line, where there is no way of telling exactly how much someone values something. To that end, popular restaurants that operate under a table booking system should charge for booking a table at peak times as well as for eating the meal. It's obvious to everyone that the laws of supply and demand factor in to the dining out experience too. A 6pm booking on a Tuesday night at a restaurant that has been open for 10 years is bound to be in much lower demand than a 7:30pm booking on a Saturday night at a popular restaurant that has only been open a few weeks.

That is why it's so easy to distort the true signals of value. A couple that phones up and books a table at random, or a few friends who walk past and grab a table on a whim, may not value their table as much as people that would have paid an extra surcharge to eat in there. Consequently, charging for table bookings at high demand restaurants increases the chances that the people who most value a dining experience have that experience, while at the same time leaving room for less-discerning people to choose other restaurants. Moreover, if non-price sensitive people pay more at peak times, price-sensitive people should find cheaper meals of the same quality at non-peak times. 

So why, then, don't such restaurants charge for booking a table? It could be for the same reason that hugely popular concert tickets don't sell for more. But it's probably also the case that popular individual restaurants that adopted this policy would unilaterally place themselves at a disadvantage against other popular restaurants that chose not to charge a booking fee. In all likelihood, this is why reservations do not have the kind of prices that would allocate diners with restaurants more optimally, and create extra societal value in doing so.

Should We Trust The Anecdotal Or The Statistical?

 

You’ve probably heard of the wisdom of crowds – the notion that, when it comes to decision-making and prediction, large groups of people are often collectively more accurate than individual experts. That is, with 100 people guessing, the average guess of, say, the weight of a cow is likely to be closer than the guess of a single expert (see blog post here). And you probably know that in statistical analyses, individual anecdotal accounts are generally less reliable than statistical data collations. The anecdote “I knew someone who smoked all his life and lived to 95” is a less good way to evaluate the life expectancy of heavy smokers than statistical analysis of a set of heavy smokers against non-smokers. And you’ve probably also worked out that the news and media are not robustly reliable channels for distilling the truth when compared with statistics. The media is biased, but the statistics report more accurately (although not perfectly) on facts.

Given the foregoing, what is the best way to get to the truth of a matter? Statistics are generally more reliable than individual anecdotes and crowd-based opinions, but at one level there is no truth quite as powerful as first-person truth. On the other hand, given that there is no such thing as an average person, and that the first person perspective cannot easily be representative of some hypothetical social mean, some of our first person perspective is bound to mislead us into thinking we reflect wider societal views or preferences. For example, if you’re convinced you live in a patriarchy, or under a right wing government, or in a Christian country, or under oppression, or in a country with great opportunity, then conformation biases might exacerbate those beliefs against wider counter-indicators.

Here’s where I think this leaves us. In some cases, the first-hand experience knows best, but other times it should give way to the wisdom of the wider consensus. And where we defer to the wider consensus, we should first do so through hard statistical data (that can be rigorously demonstrated), not skewed media narratives, which depart further from the full truth with every passing year.

Minds Closed For Business

Tom Gilovich, a social psychologist, has made intriguing discoveries about human beliefs, which go some way to explaining why so many people believe absurd things that are just plain wrong, and are so hard to be convinced otherwise. His research shows a consistent tendency that when we desire to believe something, we internally pose the question, "Can I believe this?" – and then we actively seek out evidence that supports our desired belief, and convince ourself that it is sufficient.

However, when faced with a belief we find undesirable, our internal query shifts to "Must I believe this?" – and then we look for reasons to discredit the claim. If we come across even one piece of pseudo-evidence that casts doubt, we feel justified in rejecting the belief. We use that as a pretext for freeing ourselves from the obligation of belief.

This whole “When we want to believe something, we try our best to justify belief in it, and when we don’t, we try to justify non-belief” is probably the best insight we have in to why people have such strange beliefs, and associate themselves with such nutty groups. They simply want to believe these things – which also explains why it’s so hard to talk people out of wrong thinking, even when most of the rational world continues to show how incorrect they are.

We can, of course, relate this to most of the world’s current mainstream follies. Most people in climate hysteria groups don’t really believe in the doomsday scenarios about which they forewarn – you can see from their behaviour and body language that they don’t really. Being in a climate alarmist group satisfies their need for virtue signalling, it feeds their attention-seeking, it reflects their dislike of successful people, it makes them feel like they have a cause, and it gives them a sense of identity and a sense of moral superiority (similar motivations apply to most socialists, in my experience, as there is so much overlap). All this is easy to figure out once you look carefully enough, and the same applies to many other cults, conspiracy theorists and extremist groups.

Young earth creationism is that other bogey that falls in these same traps, and perhaps the one I’ve challenged most in recent decades. Because of the perceived moral duress in terms of Divine punishment, and a perceived Biblical injunction, young earth creationists are perhaps the most prone of all to seeking out pseudo-evidence that supports their desired belief (Biblical literalism, no transitional fossils, irreducible complexity, unreliability of radiometric data, micro not macro, etc) and convince themselves that it is sufficient. And because they have no desire to accept evolution, despite the overwhelming evidence supporting it, they take the "Must I believe this?" approach, and use their pseudo-science to justify discrediting the evidence, and free themselves from the obligation of the facts.

Because the psychological roots of these cognitive biases lie in the deep-seated need for reinforcement, in-group validation and social cohesion, experience shows that rational persuasion is very rarely effective against anyone who feels they must believe something, and actively seek out evidence that supports what they want to believe. Views that are so entrenched, forming the bedrock of an individual’s perceived moral duty, ego, group identity and social solidarity are not on the table to be corrected. They are minds closed for business.